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Catastrophic forgetting affects the training of neural networks, limiting their ability to learn multiple tasks sequentially. From the perspective of the well established plasticity-stability dilemma, neural networks tend to be overly…
The study guide (textbook) is part of a set of materials designed to support high-quality practical training in physics. It includes a collection of tasks for organizing both in-class and independent work. The guide serves as a foundation…
Current conceptions of expert problem solving depict physical/conceptual reasoning and formal mathematical reasoning as separate steps: a good problem solver first translates a physical Current conceptions of quantitative problem-solving…
Highly successful students, as measured by grades and by scores on the Force Concept Inventory, still struggle with fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. These difficulties, which turn physics into parrot learning and include…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Learning physics requires understanding the applicability of fundamental principles in a variety of contexts that share deep features. One way to help students learn physics is via analogical reasoning. Students can be taught to make an…
In this paper we investigate the extent to which students' problem-solving behaviors change as a result of working on multi-faceted, context-rich problems. During the semester, groups of two to three students work on several problems that…
Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…
A fundamental challenge in developing general learning algorithms is their tendency to forget past knowledge when adapting to new data. Addressing this problem requires a principled understanding of forgetting; yet, despite decades of…
Many studies have investigated students' epistemological framing when solving physics problems. Framing supports students' problem solving as they decide what knowledge to employ and the necessary steps to solve the problem. Students may…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
Introductory physics instruction emphasizes fluency with routine problem-solving procedures. However, even when applying these procedures, students frequently encounter challenges. This paper investigates how students navigate such moments…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
Developing expertise in physics entails learning to use mathematics effectively and efficiently as applied to the context of physical situations. Doing so involves coordinating a variety of concepts and skills including mathematical…
Humans can learn individual episodes and generalizable rules and also successfully retain both kinds of acquired knowledge over time. In the cognitive science literature, (1) learning individual episodes and rules and (2) learning and…
Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Previous research has found that introductory physics students perform far better on numeric problems than on otherwise equivalent symbolic problems. This paper describes a framework to explain these differences developed by analyzing…
Most students struggle when faced with complex and ill-structured tasks because the strategies taught in schools and universities simply require finding and applying the correct formulae or strategy to answer well-structured, algorithmic…